This isn't really new though, and if you asked your great grandparents instead of your grandparents you might find it's not new at all.

If you look at what happened during the Spanish Flu pandemic, you'll find a lot of similarities to today. There's a reason we have a fair bit of U.S. Supreme Court case-law from the 20s about vaccine mandates and what-not: those matters were very relevant in the 1918-mid20s time frame mainly because of the Spanish Flu.

You might notice that people generally obey rules regardless of whether the rules are reasonable and/or justified. When rules are not reasonable or justified we might say that we have "authoritarian governance", as you put it.

If you ever wonder how people tolerated atrocities in, say, 1930s Germany, the answer is mainly two-fold, that they accepted their government's authority, and/or more importantly that anyways there wasn't anything they could do about it. It's the same today, except that our current governments aren't committing atrocities, though are being heavy-handed (and getting more so every day).

The fact that it is practically impossible for most individuals to do anything impactful about unreasonable rules in a reasonable amount of time is probably the most important factor in acceptance of authoritarian governance. I.e., it may not be acceptance of authoritarian governance as such as much as it is acceptance of one's inability to resist authoritarian governance. The latter looks a lot like the former, especially in cynical or apathetic populations, where the reasoning might go like this:

  Q: Why didn't you oppose X 20 years ago?
  A: Well, there wasn't anything I could do,
     so I did that, nothing.
  Q: OK, but why not protest?
  A: And lose my job?!

Elections are too infrequent, and the courts move even slower. As well, when it comes to elections, people don't have decent options regarding these issues, so they may continue to vote as they would usually (e.g., partisan ideology).

In other words, I would say it's necessarily that people willingly accept authoritarian governance, but that we can't really tell how much willing acceptance there is versus how much unwilling acceptance there is, and it doesn't really matter what the breakdown is.

Once a government decides to be authoritarian, it's very hard to stop it. Usually in the West we get to vote them out. In the worst case scenario they'll rig elections or simply assume total power, and then it can be decades before a country can return to a normal state. Like Franco's Spain: he had to die before Spain could return to the Estado del Derecho.

FYI, "Estado del Derecho" is a wonderful Spanish legal term of art that refers to all that which we take for granted in the West, and which translates literally to "State of Laws" ("a law" translates to "ley", while "the law" translates to "derecho", but "derecho" is also a translation of "right" as in "rights"). I wish English had such a pithy phrase in common daily use for the same concept. "State of Laws" doesn't quite capture all that "Estado del Derecho" does, as "Estado del Derecho" means, mainly (among other things), Habeas Corpus and Due Process.